Players — 2024 Week 5

No three-season ranking is shown. Combined three-season totals are tested for only some players at this position, and a ranking that left the rest out would not be a ranking of the position.

No combined total is shown for the rest of the 2024 season and the 2025–2026 seasons combined. We tested totals like it, built from our projections, against what non-starting defensive backs actually scored (5,024 player-weeks at Weeks 4, 8 and 12). At Week 12 its 90% range held for 85% of them, not close enough to 90% to publish. Starters' totals have not been tested.

No ranking by the rest of the 2024 season and the 2025 season combined is shown. That combined total is tested for only some players at this position, and a ranking that left the rest out would not be a ranking of the position.

He was not a full-time starter last season. These figures start from his own most recent season and move every stat he is scored on by how much players at his position and age have actually changed over the same span. The range around them moves those stats together, the way real seasons did, reaches down to the seasons where a player's whole workload fell away, and was widened by exactly as much as we measured it had been too narrow, and the chance he plays is the historical rate for players like him at his age.

Early read: these figures are projected for him individually. The range around them allows for the games he may miss, at the rate starters at his position have actually missed them, and moves every stat he is scored on together when he does, and the chance he plays at all is the historical rate for players who carried his workload at his age.

Early read: these figures are projected for him individually. The range around them allows for the games he may miss, at the rate starters at his position have actually missed them, and moves every stat he is scored on together when he does, and the chance he plays at all is the historical rate for players who carried his workload at his age. During the season, his figures for the seasons he will play past 30 are also lowered, by as much as we have measured starters at his position that age fall short of their projections.

He was a full-time starter last season. These figures are projected from his own most recent season, his workload, his experience and his age, by how players who matched him on those have actually done. The range around them allows for the games he may miss, at the rate starters at his position have actually missed them, moves every stat he is scored on together when he does, and was widened by as much as we measured it had been too narrow, and the chance he plays is the historical rate for players like him at his age.

51 players here are projected from the 2023 season, marked † below: no game in 2024. The number comes from the model that looks 3 seasons ahead of a 2023 season, to reach the 2026 season. From a 2023 season we publish through 2026 and no further.

About this range: we checked ranges like it against the seasons that actually followed, and it held at both levels we test — 77% of real seasons landed inside the 80% range and 86% inside the 90% range, measured on 130 player-seasons. What that testing could not settle, at this sample size, is whether this projection is more accurate than a simple baseline. We publish it because the range holds, not because it has been shown to beat one.

This total leaves out quarterback hits, which this scoring format counts at 1 point each: we do not project them past this season yet, because they are only charted from 2021 and no season-ahead projection of them has been checked against what happened. A starting defensive back records a median of 2 quarterback hits a season (2021-2025), about 2 points a season this total does not carry.